, when its mate soon appears,
and, alighting near it on the branch, the pair chatter and caress a
moment, then the fresh one enters the cavity and the other flies
away.

A few days since I climbed up to the nest of the downy woodpecker,
in the decayed top of a sugar maple. For better protection against
driving rains, the hole, which was rather more than an inch in
diameter, was made immediately beneath a branch which stretched out
almost horizontally from the main stem. It appeared merely a deeper
shadow upon the dark and mottled surface of the bark with which the
branches were covered, and could not be detected by the eye until
one was within a few feet of it. The young chirped vociferously as I
approached the nest, thinking it was the old one with food; but the
clamor suddenly ceased as I put my hand on that part of the trunk in
which they were concealed, the unusual jarring and rustling alarming
them into silence. The cavity, which was about fifteen inches deep,
was gourd-shaped, and was wrought out with great skill and
regularity. The walls were quite smooth and clean and new.

I shall never forget the circumstance of observing a pair of
yellow-bellied woodpeckers--the most rare and secluded, and, next to
the red-headed, the most beautiful species found in our
woods--breeding in an old, truncated beech in the Beaverkill
Mountains, an offshoot of the Catskills. We had been traveling,
three of us, all day in search of a trout lake, which lay far in
among the mountains, had twice lost our course in the trackless
forest, and, weary and hungry, had sat down to rest upon a decayed
log. The chattering of the young, and the passing to and fro of the
parent birds, soon arrested my attention. The entrance to the nest
was on the east side of the tree, about twenty-five feet from the
ground. At intervals of scarcely a minute, the old birds, one after
the other, would alight upon the edge of the hole with a grub or
worm in their beaks; then each in turn would make a bow or two, cast
an eye quickly around, and by a single movement place itself in the
neck of the passage. Here it would pause a moment, as if to
determine in which expectant mouth to place the morsel, and then
disappear within. In about half a minute, during which time the
chattering of the young gradually subsided, the bird would again
emerge, but this time bearing in its beak the ordure of one of the
helpless family. Flying away very slowly with head lowered and